To the sleepless, this is my reply.

I switched on the TV, attempting to escape the pangs of heart burn that seem to have consumed my chest and made it, nearly, impossible to breathe.  I’m not sure if these are symptoms of the onset of an ugly asthma attack or not.  They hurt.    Trying, in vain, to find a position that will make the pain go away for a second or two, I flip absently through the stations, landing on the History Channel.  When in doubt, there’s always something on there.  Too distracted to really realize what I had flipped to, I gave up on the remote and tossed my body in the chair, until I looked up and noticed it.

It wasn’t just a documentary.  It was rough footage taken from a hand-held camcorder, by an out-of-breath man, running in the streets of New York.  Running from two, smoke erupting buildings, who’s existence, no longer grace the skyline.

And I cried.  I sobbed.  I wept.  Because I never really understood what happened that day, and I still don’t.  My mind wrapped around the loss of life.  The loss of sons, daughters, mothers, fathers, brothers, and sisters.  The consuming hatred of so many taking physical form.  I wept, because I was in pain, but not in as much as what was unfolding in front of me, again.  It still feels real.  It still hurts.  And that explosion in my chest, it was forgotten for a little while.

Unable to watch anymore, I turned it off, and I thought.  I sat down, and here I am, writing.  Possibly, the same thing that I did on that day.

It scares me.  It’s frightening to know that there are people so consumed by hatred and declaring it in the name of God.  The same God that I love and am constantly seeking after.  It scares me that there is evidence that God condoned murder, now recorded in my Bible.  It scares me to think that there are people that hear something that they decipher as ‘God’ telling them to murder in His name.

Once again, I found a clear explanation as to why I see Christ as my savior.  I know that God can get angry.  I know that God is heartbroken, when I do things that I know that He doesn’t want me to do.  I know that He’s sad when I try and run away from Him.  But, I know that He’ll never be mad enough at me to hate me.  In the same way that I know that I can make my parents mad, I know that they’ll never hate me.  They will never not love me.  And I like to think that God feels that way about everyone.  He has hope for everyone, like I have hope that He’s there.

The reason I know that he doesn’t hate me, is because Christ became the symbol of everything that God might hate in me, and all of that was destroyed, in a perfect person.  I have to believe in the cross, because I can’t believe that my God would hate me.  I can’t believe that, in the same way that I can’t believe that my parents would ever hate me.  I grew up knowing and feeling love, constantly.  I was always reminded that I was loved.  My mummy loves me bigger than the whole universe.  My daddy loves me more than any other little girl.  For me, that love is not questionable.  And growing up, learning about this God that loves me so much, I learned that he wants me to love as much as He does.

So, I’m scared when I find that there are people that hate.  I’m worried when I find people that hate in the name of the same God that taught me how to love.

These people aren’t just in one place.  They’re not just in Afghanistan.  They’re not just in Iraq, Iran, North Korea, Cuba.  They’re everywhere.  No army can wipe them out, and I’m not sure if that’s what we’re supposed to do.  I don’t hate the soldiers that are fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan.  A few of them are my friends and family.  I pray for them.  I love them.  And I know that they love in the same capacity that I do.  I’m unsure if I can put my complete trust in any politician’s hands.  I don’t know what the right course of action is.  I know that God knows.

I pray for those people that have found so much hate.  I pray that they find love.  I pray that they find it before it’s too late.  Yeah, I’m scared for them.

I’ve been listening to Jack’s Mannequin all day, almost non-stop.  It hasn’t grown old.  It changes meaning with every song.  I listen to the words of the song that I watched Andrew sing to me.  He sang with that piano, and every line was coated with emotion, and passion.  A passion for life.  A hope he found for love.  He says to swim.  And that’s what we do.  We swim through all of these scary days, and we run through these terror filled moments, hoping that there’s something better at the other end.  And there is.

And while I read a book about one young man’s disappointment with humanity, I can’t help but to feel that this is all of us.  While most of us don’t retreat into the wilderness and cut ourselves off from human contact completely, we do it in some form.  We run to the bottle.  We go to work.  We retreat to the backs of our minds.  We lay in bed.  Hatred is scary, and it leaves the ones that we need to have contact with sad, heart-broken, and confused.  While he learned, too late, that human error happens, and that we don’t like everything that everyone else does, we do need love.  All we need is love.  It’s cliche, but true.  That’s all there is.  When we’re alone, we crave it.  When we’re together, we feel it.

While, I view hatred as barbaric, I know that people have the ability to love, and that’s the best ability that they have.  I hope and I pray that that is seen.  That it’s found.  Because without that, it’ll always be scary.

And that’s why I hope.  That’s why I need to believe.

That’s why I have faith.